A client shared with me a high-pressure sales pitch he’s been getting from an online promotion company.
The deal is pretty simple: you pay a monthly fee of $120 dollars to stay on page 1 of the search results for Google. That is, if you’re on page 1 that month, you pay. If you’re not, you don’t. There’s a fee for the first month, to get your rankings up. After that, you pay only for results.
Doesn’t that sound great?
It might, unless you know how search engines work.
While this online promotion company assured my client that Google rotates your link off page 1, and thus a continual watchful eye and “quick optimization of your link” is a must, in fact the search engines search for the best pages to offer the searcher. That name, “search engine,” is a bit of a clue. The search engines then offer the best, most appropriate, most trustworthy page — as far as they can tell — to the searcher. The bit about rotating people off the front page is, if I may be forgiven a technical term, a lie.
No reputable SEO guarantees any particular results, any more than a pediatrician is going to guarantee your kid a particular height. It depends.
We provide website management services, including linkbuilding, blogging, social media management, analytics, email newsletters, and related services. We pay close attention to clients’ goals and work hard to help them attain those goals.
But if I were a confidence trickster, I could offer to keep hundreds of people on the front page for $120 a month, per keyword, each. Once they were on the front page, I could take their money and do absolutely nothing. Chances are, many of them would stay there on the front page for that particular keyword. They would happily send me money for nothing every month. Those whose rankings slipped — perhaps because a competitor got busy and did something to push them off to page 2 — wouldn’t pay me.
I wouldn’t care. There are plenty more suckers out there, right?
Mind you, I’m not saying that the company my client told me about is running a scam. Perhaps they don’t know any better themselves. I’m just saying what I, if I were a confidence trickster, which I’m not, could do.
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